Switzerland's lockdown has sharply reduced the cases of Covid-19
actu.epfl.ch
actu.epfl.ch
Hand shaking completely disappeared, oncoming walking people making a bend to guarantee the distance of 6 feet, hand sanitizers for everybody everywhere, businesses and associations have to publish government-approved conceptions of protection against infections before re-opening and many other little changes.
However relatively little face masks, no curfew and as of today life is going on not quite as before. For example, next week swimming courses for children resume, but parents are asked to send the children already clothed for swimming and are warned if they don't follow the guidelines they and their children will be excluded. In the local hospital all visitors are given face masks to be worn without exception by a Securitas (a private police) employee.
I'm kind of shocked how few people use them in Switzerland. Not that I know for sure how much do masks help, but it's so cheap to get them! And the supply is now plentiful. Talk about cost/reward, especially when compared to debilitating costs of things like shutdowns ...
In either case, Europe is cool for now. Let's see what will the Autumn and Winter bring.
And Switzerland probably never will pass this threshold.
That's a massive overstatement. I live in Geneva, one of the worst hit cantons (they say around 10% infection rate). Way too many people for a long time simply didn't care, the list of personal anecdotes is way too long to post here.
We all were seeing what is happening few kms south from our border, and government did nothing for almost 2 weeks. It was seriously ridiculous, all restaurants and concerts packed, when 50km south Italian hospitals were already flooded and news was everywhere. There was vote on top level of government which ended up in favor of keeping business opened, because money. People rarely using face masks, even during hardest hits not even half of supermarket shoppers wore masks, on streets barely anybody. Most of the supermarket staff didn't use any mask either.
Generally German-speaking parts were much less affected, I've heard many personal stories from friends that were verbally attacked and mocked on streets and shops for wearing masks (locals mockingly start coughing behind them in shop and rest of the staff having a blast). I know of several people that were fired back in march/april because they came to work in simple face masks due to them being immune-deficient, and management decided to fire them on spot for 'spreading panick', no discussion (if you are blue collar foreigner here, sometimes locals treat you like disposable piece of shit and don't even try to hide it).
Once laws were changed people started behaving a bit more sane, but far from ideal - many people on streets and parks completely ignoring 2 meter rule (even 1 meter). I saw an old guy sitting on bench in the park, coughing like hell, no mask, while on phone having laughs how other people avoided him, even police patrol which didn't even bother to talk to him.
How well this country fares now, despite all of this gives me hope that it ain't that bad with covid. Swiss didn't 'beat' it due to great behavior they showed, in contrary. My home country was much more prudent and restriction were quick and followed by almost eveyrbody, and they ended up with 5% of the Swiss infection rate, despite being of similar size. Of course it could be that it was still stellar behavior en Suisse compared to what common Italians or Spaniards showed, this I can't compare.
But once people realized that this is going to be real bad if it continues unchecked, behaviour changed a lot IMO, even in regions that had very little virus activity.
True, mask wearing is still a problem, and you could see lots of people doing outside activities even during the worst part of the lock down. But as luck would have it, outside infections seem to play almost no epidemiological role. Turns out not wearing masks on the street or going for a Sunday hike on crowded paths isn't a big deal, and in retrospect I'm glad that our lock-down wasn't quite as limiting as in other parts of Europe.
I wish masks were mandatory on public transport, though.
The mask wearers look rather foolish because the data is by now very clear that this is no worse than any other year's flu. It's just not a dangerous disease. The hype is illusory, the models were wrong. The barriers in restaurants and perspex in supermarkets is as far as it goes and even that looks over the top.
as luck would have it, outside infections seem to play almost no epidemiological role
But is it luck? Or is it that the Swiss people reached the correct conclusions much faster than the supposed experts advising the world? As you say, the behaviour was correct, and the moment the similarities in behaviour to other common viruses became apparent, that wasn't irrational.
I wish masks were mandatory on public transport, though.
Please no. Virtually nobody has been doing this and cases have now hit zero anyway so why would it have ever mattered? When will we learn that practically every piece of supposedly expert advice during this pandemic has been wrong? The wisdom of the crowds is far better here than the wisdom of the academics.
see "Wöchentliche Todesfälle in der Schweiz", and remember the red curve is with measures, the greys without. Maybe you haven't had a friend's uncle die of covid. It could have been much worse; I think we got lucky.
I saw it long time ago as normal in south east Asia and it looked like a fine example of compassion towards rest of the population. Compared to usual west when people often go about their business, not caring much about others ie in public transport, schools or open offices. Only now it became acceptable in otherwise advanced place like Switzerland, till now one often faced real persecution, mocking and overall rejection from large parts of society.
Rest of your comment is unfortunately pure garbage, not worth any feedback.
Also see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439687
IMO some of the main reasons for that were;
- Switzerland has an effective / working healthcare system
- Personal health is taken pretty seriously; there's a general emphasis on fitness and good diet - Switzerland has one of the lowest obesity rates in Europe for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Switzerland
- Measures like shutting schools and working from home were implemented pretty quickly at the beginning of March.
- As a whole people behaved sensibly. Advice from the government was taken. There was no panic but largely people adapted to the new situation very quickly
- Finally, in general, the social systems works well here. There aren't large numbers of homeless and most people furloughed or who lost their job will have received at least 80% of their normal salary, so you don't have large numbers of people living in unhealthy conditions that would help a virus spread
That's also reflected on how insurance companies work and incentivize personal health in Switzerland, too.
Switzerland has its fair share of non-compliant idiots, but the share is historically smaller than in other countries and the country itself is small. So the idiots don't create enough of critical mass to make it appears as an "alternative norm" and they end up sticking out as exceptions.
That said, there was a considerable push back to the closure of restaurants and bars. In the end, they HAD to be closed formally, because simple pleas for behaving responsibly and not congregating into larger groups did not work well. Especially on Fridays. But once a law is in place, it is generally observed and not questioned.
What bothers me is that SRF2 was reporting untraceable fake news left by voicemail — which were in Züritüütsch. I'd have thought that would have been too small a demographic to be worth targeting?
https://interaktiv.tagesanzeiger.ch/2020/wuhan-schweiz/
However keep in mind that there's just 8.5 mil people in Switzerland. That's around the same as New York City and 2/3 of the size of Moscow.
Some findings HN readers might find interesting, I'm referring to figures in the manuscript[1] and it's appendix.
- R0 has started to decrease before the government measures (Fig 2). It even reaches 1 simultaneously to the main "lockdown" measure.
- Mobility (from google mobility reports) also started to decrease before the measures (Fig. 3), but R0 also started to decrease before even mobility (Fig. 3).
- People awareness seemed to rise before government measures and mobility decrease, consistent with google trends (Appendix Fig. 14). Might explain why R0 starts to decrease so early.
- The appendix contains an interesting data analysis of hospitalization processes, with data on env. 1'000 patients. The length of stay in ICU are incredibly long. To answer the question: How long ?, we performed a survival analysis. It's necessary as estimates (such as the mean) are biased towards shorter stays.
- A serology study is conducted at the moment in Geneva. It seems that our estimates of seroprevalence (Fig. 5: only 3% country wide by April 24) are consistent with the study (Appendix Fig. 7). We were quite proud of that, as these results were unknown to us at the time.
- Method wise: There is different way of estimating R0 given hospitalization, death, cases:
(i) Most estimates are done with methods "deconvoluting" the data using the distributions (Cori et al, Wallinga and Teunis, implemented in the EpiEstim R package). It can works very well, but it's tricky to have unbiased estimates (see [2]).
(ii) Other methods involve choosing a breakpoint and calibrating to R0: before and after breakpoint. Variations of this method involve calibrating the breakpoint date, choosing a shape (e.g spline) and calibrating all the parameters. These method rely on some assumptions on the decrease. A incorrect assumption leads to biased estimates. E.g it would seem reasonable to assume R0 to decrease on the day of the government measures. But from what we estimated it wasn't the case in Switzerland. So your estimate of R0 post-measure would be lower than what it is really (to catch-up).
The method used here uses the full timeserie and no assumptions. First we built an hidden-markov model of COVID-19 transmission and hospitalization (see diagram Appendix Fig. 4). We performed frequentist inference (using [3]) of relevant parameters. Last, we "filter" R0 as a state of our model: R0 is a random walk, with calibrated variance and using particle filter we keep only R0 timeseries that support the underlying data. Therefore we impose no assumption on R0.
[1] https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20295 and Appendix
What about individual regions? I ask because most of the dynamics I've seen originate around hotspots, and thus it may be interesting to see how individual regions were affected (because it may drive different responses).
E.g., the Spain seroprevalence study said 5% country wide. But the estimates per regions can be as up to 3 times that (Madrid itself is ~11%).
The same has been found by other groups on France.
Governments are both not doing widespread testing to see how many people have the virus, and taking draconian measures to contain its spread.
From what we know, 90% of the population already could already have it. Every time I read of somebody testing a big group of people a huge percentage has it, but the virus is so mild that they didn't even know—since it caused no symptoms.
Looks like there are many other diseases and problems that cause dozen of times more deaths, so either there's a reason why this is getting special treatment, or it's just a complete loss of common sense here, in my opinion.
Really? Any examples?
0. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/494324-27m-new-yorkers...
Definitely it's not from-what-we-know-90%-of-the-population-had-it huge.
And those are the numbers from one of the most affected places in the world.
And there's plenty of unpleasant stories about long term effects. All in all I'm pretty scared of catching it.
I'm glad you're young and fit and happy to accept the lower risk.
I'm not so happy about your lack of concern for others.
AIDS is a good example of this. It's more deadly than coronavirus, but because it was seen as a disease of gay people, governments initially invested extremely little in treatment or stopping the spread. According to WHO, 32 million people have died of AIDS since it appeared, and most of those deaths would have been prevented with easy access to and faster development of the antivirals now used to treat it in rich countries.
Malaria is another one. It kills hundreds of thousands of people each year (mostly in Africa), and is largely preventable by relatively simply approaches like mosquito nets. For a small fraction of the trillions of dollars involved in trying to stop covid19, most of these fatalities could be prevented.
Are you concerned about the tens of millions of people who lost their jobs and businesses? Losing your job is a pretty horrible experience too, especially for the low-income groups who are most affected by the lockdown. What about the people whose mental health has been shattered by forced social isolation; "A year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks": https://abc7news.com/suicide-covid-19-coronavirus-rates-duri...
In fairness I guess I was reacting less to your specific comment and more to the chunk of this community that seems to think anyone under 60 should be running through the streets with joyous abandon.
This I agree with. I'd argue however that most countries have done a terrible job of it, e.g. nobody has published a cost-benefit analysis expressed in some kind of comparable unit like QALY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year). Seems most analysis either only looks at the cost or only looks at the benefits, or makes no attempt to quantify them. Maybe it's not politically appealing to put a number on human lives, but that's what public health officials routinely do when dealing with other issues, because otherwise it's impossible to make consistent comparisons and judgements.
>more to the chunk of this community that seems to think anyone under 60 should be running through the streets with joyous abandon.
This is a consequence of the lockdowns that some people anticipated. I.e. much like making drugs illegal isn't necessarily the most scientifically effective way to reduce drug usage, forcing everybody to stay at home isn't necesssarily the best way to keep everyone at home. People forced into something are less likely to comply for a long time than people who decided to do something of their own free will, or were otherwise persuaded to.
Keeping most of the population who is not at risk from developing herd immunity is lengthening the time of exposure for the people who are at risk.
Just the fact we haven't updated our strategy at all after getting data on the age distributions is pretty bad.
While we may have to face this outcome I think it's too early to do so until we have more data and a deeper understanding of the disease.
In the UK I get the impression that the population is more cautious about loosening the lock down than the government is. I think other countries are the same. The US might be the outlier here.
eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPLx4cVJW10
(Koch may be retired now, but don't think we're out of the woods yet — we're still in double digits)
I don't have any sources for this, but living in Switzerland, and from what I am hearing from local sources - nobody is being turned away from being tested. I don't believe your statement being true for Switzerland. Early measures, people generally following guidelines has helped reduce the spread of the virus here in Switzerland.
So we are going to base our global health strategy on your "hunch"?
Any source on this?
GP knows that their argument is wrong, and is deliberately lying.
It is a huge country and it was "so many flights" from China, instead of "so many flights" from Hubei province.
If it's hard to wrap this try swap China and the US.
- there are direct flights from Wuhan (and Shanghai, #8 in the world) to SFO (Trump stopped the Chinese flights Jan. 31, but Chinese travellers were detouring through Africa and Europe in Feb.)
- but local travel outside Wuhan was restricted (latest Jan. 23, Disneyworld Shanghai was closed Jan. 24)
- the Cambridge and Washington corona models are overly pessimistic and start late - the first Wuhan hospitalization was Dec. 1, and with the direct flights to SFO, corona was in the US in mid-Dec.
What's hard for you and other HNers to wrap your head around is that all the reported information is completely wrong.
The best source I've seen so far is this:
The Failure of Expert Predictions and Models | The Coronavirus and Public Policy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG2vdyfLv7U
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson also has about 3 interviews that add to that. Search Youtube for "covid-19 victor davis hanson"
(We independently came to the identical analysis of corona for California, literally word-for-word, which is the opposite of the sensationalist news media. The Santa Clara hospital dashboard confirms this, being flat for months.)
Bullshit. Spain, which was hit quite hard, already did widespread antibody studies and the result was that only about 5% of the population might have contracted it.
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-05-14/antibody-study...
Educate yourself and please don't spread lies and ignorance.
Also, you picked 5%, but in your article they also say it's almost 15% in some areas. You're not spreading lies now, right?
In actual trials, has a single one actually been shown to work reliably?
Here in the UK there's a new story every week about how yet another antibody test has been withdrawn or rejected by PHE because it wasn't accurate.
> Also, you picked 5%
You mean, the actual title of the article and the average of the whole country?
> Antibody study shows just 5% of Spaniards have contracted the coronavirus
> From what we know, 90% of the population already could already have it.
Well, no, from what we know, 5% of the population in Spain - one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, I might add - had it.
Whether the seroprevalence is up to 15% in some areas is of no consequence to your original point.
What? 1 in 5 in a city is quite far from 90%, isn't it?
If you spew the "90% might have it" bullshit claim when you were fully aware that at best you know of a city which might have 20% then it looks like you are intentionally and knowingly spreading lies and false information. Don't do that.
> Also, you picked 5%, but in your article they also say it's almost 15% in some areas. You're not spreading lies now, right?
We were making global claims about how 90% might already contracted covid19. I presented a country-wide study, which as of today is the best and most extensive one done at a country-level.
The study points out a 5% infection rate in one of the countries which so far has been hit the hardest.
Do you have a problem with that study?
Moreover, the hotspot you cherry-picked refer to specific cities and municipalities. Soria, For example, barely has a population of 90k. Madrid comes second with 11%, which is 6% higher than the national average and still lower than 90%.
So even your cherry picking doesn't deflect the fact that your claim that 90% might have it is clearly bullshit and that you are knowingly and intentionally lying and spreading false information.